Certain medical conditions render a person incontinent. If the person is mobile, i.e., not confined to a bed or chair, he or she typically has an ostomy or urine pouching system into which feces or urine constantly flow through a tube or catheter in the person's body. Millions of people throughout the world have undergone medical procedures or have medical conditions requiring either short term or permanent use of an ostomy or urine pouch or bag. In the following disclosure, such containers will be referred to simply as body waste bags, or simply, waste bags.
Typically, such a bag is strapped or otherwise attached to the user's leg or body under their clothes. Bags are available in drainable (reusable) or disposable versions.
A person fitted with a body waste bag typically has no control over bodily fluid releases and timing and no sensation when they occur, their duration, and their volume. Thus a wearer has little idea of the remaining capacity in the bag. Once a bag fills, it will usually overflow and spill a portion of the contents. The potential for overflow of the bag is constant.
Overflow of waste bag, particularly in public, is at the least, an event fraught with embarrassment for the wearer. An overflow event may even have adverse health consequences, for example by causing infection of an existing wound or incision. But the public humiliation and embarrassment is more than sufficient for waste bag wearer to prevent overflow at all costs.
Because a waste bag is strapped under clothes to the wearer's leg or body, visual inspection requires partial disrobing. Simple tactile sensing or manipulation of the bag through one or more layers of cloth is not a reliable method to determine the remaining capacity. Alternatively, a wearer may schedule frequent time-consuming and in certain circumstances, inconvenient visual inspections. As a practical matter, the only way a patient can visually monitor the level in a bag is to disrobe sufficiently to allow inspection.
Because of these considerations, error-free visual monitoring of remaining pouch capacity in a public setting is almost impossible to achieve. The effect of this situation often causes wearers of waste bags to limit human interaction, with obvious psychological consequences.
Existing level sensing devices all have one or more disadvantages. For example, a device that mounts permanently on a disposable bag will be discarded with the bag, adding cost to the bag. Such level-sensing devices cannot be easily reset to alarm at different levels of remaining capacity. This may be important depending on the wearer's expected activities of eating, drinking, event-attending, etc.
One existing level-sensing system mounts permanently on the bag and uses a magnet and armature arrangement to sense when the bag contents reach a preselected level. This may operate successfully, but changing the time from alarming to actual overflow is not easy.
Mechanical systems may create the potential for leakage. A mechanical system may also jam or bind, creating difficulty in sensing a full bag and consequent failure to provide appropriate notice to the wearer. For example, a float within the bag may not be easy to tactilely detect through one or more layers of cloth. If an alarm function is incorporated in a float-based detector, an issue arises as to how the float level detection occurs and how the float level signal is interpreted.
Other waste bag level-sensing units are not compatible with or easily retrofitted to waste bags currently available. Such units may well require bag redesign to accommodate level sensing, making existing bag inventories and manufacturing processes obsolete.